Comedy’s Trump-era failure and other commentary

From the left: Comedy’s Trump-era Failure

Saturday Night Live bungled a golden chance for sharp satire in the Trump years, notes Chapo Trap House’s Matt Christman at The Drift, offering only drab finger-wagging and “apocalyptic moralism.” Right after Election Day 2016, it gave us a lame open of “Kate McKinnon sitting at a piano, in Hillary’s white pantsuit and hair helmet, singing ‘Hallelujah,’ ” a bleak harbinger for four years of sketches about supposed savior Robert Mueller and Alec Baldwin “draining anything funny out of the world-historically hilarious figure he was attempting to lampoon” in his Trump impression. It was four years of a “comedy-adjacent gloss on every MSNBC fantasy of Russian collusion and eventual comeuppance.” 

Libertarian: Times’ Tech Writers Push Censorship

At Reason, Robbie Soave slams blatant New York Times’ misreporting on a Silicon Valley blogger. Times’ Tech reporter Cade Metz had already harassed the then-psuedonymous clinical psychiatrist by saying he’d be revealing his real name, which prompted “Scott Alexander” to change jobs and self-reveal as Scott Siskind. And the story Metz published Saturday was “a lazy hit piece that actively misleads readers, giving them the false impression that Siskind is at the center of a stealth plot to infiltrate Silicon Valley and pollute it with noxious far-right ideas.” Yet “Metz does not even begin to prove” his false accusation that Siskind offered a “freewheeling haven for white supremacists,” and wrongly paints the shrink as holding extremist views on race and IQ and on gender and work aptitudes. It seems “the Times simply wants to tarnish every view that exists outside its own narrow purview, perhaps because the Times has appointed itself the gatekeeper of the unsayable.”

From the right: Unconstitutional Election ‘Reform’

Democrats’ House Resolution 1 would “federalize the rules of . . . presidential elections,” which is clearly unconstitutional, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Jason Snead explain at The Wall Street Journal. It plainly defies the Electors Clause, which pointedly lets Congress choose only the day states choose electors and when the Electoral College meets, but “gives state legislatures plenary power over the manner of selecting presidential electors.” The Founders in 1787 purposely chose to “avoid the president’s selection by Congress” to ensure the chief executive’s independence.

Conservative: Bill Gates’ Climate Hysteria

Microsoft gazillionaire Bill Gates recently called climate change “the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced,” warning that wealthy nations “must get to zero carbon emissions by 2050 or the world is basically kaput,” reports National Review’s David Harsanyi. But while Gates admits that decarbonization won’t be cheap, “he still relies heavily on fearmongering and dire predictions to make those costs appear palatable.” Fossil fuels have improved our lives “in incalculable ways,” even as the state of the earth has been “improving in almost every quantifiable way,” so “unless some completely new technology emerges, it will take a fascistic technocracy to win this conflict.” Gates must explain why “intentionally creating great economic hardship for America and upturning modernity every year” for three decades is truly necessary, as that’s “the only way we get to zero carbon emissions in 30 years.”

Energy beat: Learn From Texas

The Lone Star State’s experience with wind turbines — half of which were “unable to generate electricity because of ice on their blades” amid a recent brutal winter storm— is a “cautionary tale for the northeast,” warns Jonathan Lesser at City Journal. Resulting electric shortages forced rolling blackouts, leaving millions without power amid the cold. Yet “the northeast intends to become heavily reliant on offshore wind.” Its leaders think batteries can provide backup, yet building enough storage to supply just New York with four hours of power during a nor’easter “would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.” No matter: Expect wind advocates to ignore the warnings and “march confidently into a future of sky-high electricity rates — and rolling blackouts.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board